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of bits and steel.

At the same time I built the previous 251 I also built this KV1 Russian Tank also with worn down winter camouflage.

This Hobby Boss kit is not a hard build and looks quite nice, though the tracks are somewhat hard to work with, though that may be because I simply hate working with tracks in general; It was quite the challenge to paint them separately and put them in place at the end. I definitely don’t recommend this approach.

Like the 251 this one also had no after market added to it, though I do think the engine grills would profit from a nice PE set to replace the stock ones.

All in all it’s a fun kit that lends itself very well to all kinds of weathering.

After almost a year since my last post here comes my latest work. It has been almost finished for quite a while but unfortunately life has been getting on the way of modelling.

This kit was made in a workshop at Greenmodels with supervision from Filipe Ferreira.

The kit itself is really great fun, very detailed, but as most non Japanese companies the plastic is far too soft for my taste and the many small and fragile pieces get damaged very very easily, so care needs to be taken when building it.

As the kit already has good detail, no aftermarket was added; Even the tracks are quite passable.

The colour scheme was the regular panzer grey to keep it simple, but to add some fancyness and interest I added worn down, winter camouflage. On top of that some dirt and grime for extra flavour.

It’s been quite a while but my modelling is not stopped, unfortunately the time to publish wip posts is severely lacking, but I have a bunch of models finished or close to so new posts should be popping up.

The first one to be completed is the Eduard limited edition of the P-38 Lightning. The kit has the academy plastic with some Eduard upgrades, namely the resin wheels, superchargers and cockpit, a pair of photoetch frets, painting masks and cartograph waterslides for 5 different aricraft.

Usually Eduard does a great job and the detail is certenly there but the cockpit was quite difficult to put together. The side walls and the floor seem to be in a different scale with the walls being bigger than they should by a rather large margin. This made the assembly quite difficult and putting it in place inside the gondola a nightmare. With some effort I did manage, and you can’t really see much of the cockpit anyway so. I would probably skip it if I made another one and just use the plastic cockpit.

The rest of the kit was also somewhat complicated. This is not a kit for the inexperienced. It can build into a good looking model, but it requires a ton of work to fix all the alignment issues, and gaps. If you pick this up expect to spend a lot of time sanding and puttying.

Still, in the end all that work makes finishing it that more satisfying.

And it’s done. Not the best kit from Bandai but it’s still a very high quality one and no fault at all on the looks. The only really big flaw is the fit on the tower as you can easily see with the big gap. Had I tested it before painting and final assembly it would have been an easy fix. besides that for anyone thinking on building one, I recommend that you assemble the whole hull as well as the decks, because when you snap those in place you need to apply quite a bit of pressure that can damage the work on the seems.

Continuing in my slow pace the ship is all built up and ready for primer and paint. As I’ve said previously I was really not expecting so much work, but this kit has a lot of gaps to fill and a ton of parts with mould lines in inappropriate places that need to be cleaned up. All in all not the best Bandai kit, actually from those I’ve built this is the worst. Still it builds up to a very good looking Yamato on 1000th scale so it’s hardly a bad kit just a bit inferior to what I’m used from Bandai.

Note that the front piece of the tower is not completely in place since I will need to remove it for painting and it would be impossible to do so if it was firmly in place.

A couple of weeks ago I went to check the first Greenmodels Figure Tournament, promoted by my favourite lhs. The quality of the work displayed there was really inspiring and I couldn’t leave without taking some shots of my favourite entries.

Slow and steady she goes. I’ve been working on the hull, cleaning up and filling gaps, and I can tell you that his is allot more work than I was expecting.

There are two main problems here. One is that in order to have the colour separation there are allot more parts than would be needed otherwise. The second is that, to make it a snap fit, the actual fit of the parts gets affected in various ways.

The underside had a considerably large seam that needed filling. Them seam was over 1mm it the furthest. Not terrible to fix.

This one was much worse, specially since that section is loose without any support, which means that a slight mishandle would ruin all the work. It did happen a couple of times.

With that out of the way I started on the hangar, which fits nicely in it’s slot. The problem is that the section of the hull that goes over this, needs to be puttied on the upside to cover a seam, but if that is done it will be impossible to uncover this part of the ship closing off the engine and hangar.

It’s somewhat of a pity but I’ll just display the hangar outside and close the ship to have every seam fixed.

Still quite a lot of work ahead. I thought this would be a quicker build but that just means that I will squeeze more hours out of it 😉